French Intellectuals and Politics from the Dreyfus Affair to the Occupation (review)

This book is an informative and thoroughgoing analysis of the role of French intellectuals in the Third Republic and Vichy. The 'engagement' of writers and thinkers over Dreyfus's imprisonment on false charges of spying illustrates the nature of the relationship between intellectuals and politics for the following fifty years: that is to say, that the particular (Dreyfus) interpolates the moral concern of intellectuals because it expresses and contributes to the universal (an ethical regime). Drake looks at the roles of the myriad individuals and how they mobilized in favour or against a range of causes in the first half of the bewilderingly eventful twentieth century. Drake's emphasis is particularly upon the left intellectuals and their relationship to events in the context of Marxism and the Russian Revolution and its consequences. What strikes the reader is how all over the place many of the intellectuals and their commitments and strategies were. Drake cites Sartre's comment that intellectuals got involved in the issues that did not concern them, and one of the striking things brought out by Drake's analysis is the amateurishness of many of the positions and strategies adopted — and how wrong they so often were.

Initially, for example, how wrong they were about the importance of Dreyfus, but also the dangers of Nazism, the horrors of the Soviet Union, the brutality of the Comintern, the realities of collaboration, and so on. In many ways intellectuals could only be wrong — to do nothing was pathetic, to take sides usually meant misunderstanding the essentials. The combination of the complexities of understanding and the complexities of 'events' meant that the intellectual's journey was often tortuous, contradictory, and confused — and often for nothing. It is clear from Drake's analysis that things were becoming so complex that, certainly by the 1930s, it was a question of just trying to keep up with an ever-changing and intellectually baffling series of events. The shifting views of, to name but a fraction, Rolland, Barbusse, Aragon, Barrès, Doriot, Drieu and Sartre, are fascinating — the right and extreme right trajectories in particular are often repulsive but compelling; but also fascinating is how they all criss-cross one another over the years. On this latter point, what is also striking is how incestuous and Parisian most of this life was, and also sometimes how both intellectually and morally mediocre. In a way, between themselves, give or take a February 1934, how jolly good fun it was from Dreyfus until 1940 when it becomes almost suddenly horrendous, heroic and very real. In fact, from 1940, when the ludic aspects disappear, one can see in horrific clarity many of the psychic realities beneath the politics, particularly on the right: the blood lust, the deathwishing, the racism, the vengeful adoption of murder and accessory to murder and torture demonstrating how, all said and done, important the relationship of thinkers to politics actually is. Drake's analysis stops in 1945, and a sequel would be welcome. A theoretically orientated concluding chapter on the true significance of 'thought' upon political practice would also be welcome. The role of the intellectuals is largely a boy's (almost Boy's Own) story, and analysis of the significance of this would be illuminating. When issues become dramatically polarized, it is often impossible not to take sides, but this often means that the best voices go unheard and certainly unheeded. In many ways, the twentieth century in France was witness to this phenomenon. Drake's survey of the intellectuals from Dreyfus to the defeat of Fascism is a very welcome contribution to the literature.